Virginia Hamilton

Virginia Hamilton, writer: born Yellow Springs, Ohio 12 March 1936; married 1960 Arnold Adoff (one son, one daughter); died Dayton, Ohio 19 February 2002.

Virginia Hamilton was one of the finest contemporary American authors for children. Following the success of her first novel, Zeely (1967), she wrote about one book every year since. She came into the children's-book world when titles from African-American authors made up only a tiny percentage of the 5,000 new books published annually, and lived to see multi-cultural literature for young readers become the norm rather than the exception.

Born a fifth and much-loved last child on a small farm in the village of Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1936, Hamilton from an early age feasted on family stories. She was particularly moved by tales about her grandfather Levi Perry, who was smuggled over the Ohio River by the Underground Railroad away from slavery in Virginia. Virginia Hamilton was named in his honour, after the state he escaped from, and grew up surrounded by cousins, aunts, and uncles, in addition to her own parents, who were also storytellers as well as musicians.

She adored school, where she won prizes for writing and for the amount of books she read, and was offered a full university scholarship to Ohio State University. Unable to finish her studies because of financial problems, she moved to New York, where she married the poet Arnold Adoff in 1960.

After a number of false starts as a writer she finally produced Zeely. Based on a story she had written as an undergraduate, this captivating novel describes a lonely and imaginative girl who, during a summer spent on her uncle's farm, comes to believe that a mysterious local woman is in fact a Watusi queen. All the characters are black, but this is never presented as causing them or anyone else any problem in itself. Instead, here were rounded, real-sounding people getting on with their lives.

More titles followed, including picture books, retellings of black folk tales and science fiction, in addition to a steady supply of realistic novels. In 1975 her fine story M.C. Higgins, the Great won the Newbery Award, the first time this prestigious literary prize had been given to a black writer. It is about a boy whose family home is overshadowed by a huge spoil heap created by strip mining. From first wanting everyone to move, the boy finally decides to fight his corner once he realises that the house contains memories too precious to leave behind.

As in all Hamilton's stories, much of the narrative is told in dialogue using the rich local argot of the characters concerned. Meaning is sometimes elliptical, with symbols sharing space with realism and a hint of fantasy never far away. But the end result is totally convincing, however occasionally surreal. Her characters remain individuals rather than types, and their struggles have more to do with personalities than politics.

Hamilton and her husband decided to move away from the pressures of city life back to Yellow Springs, to live in a modern house built in the middle of a cornfield formerly owned by her parents. Her two children were born there, into a household that already boasted 10 cats and a dog. There Hamilton continued to write with even greater confidence. In addition to other prize-winning novels there were also biographies, including one of Paul Robeson (Paul Robeson: the life and times of a free black man, 1974), and more on the lives of freed slaves as part of what she called "liberation literature".

The research that went into her studies of the black oral tradition also revealed long-forgotten songs, riddles and stories. Some of these were to make their way into her Many Thousands Gone: African Americans from slavery to freedom (1993), a series of dramatic and haunting sketches of the experience of slaves and their search for liberty.

Nicholas Tucker